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Counting the Animals again

The Home Office has now published its Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals, Great Britain for 2018. Here is VERO’s selective summary of the numbers and species, alongside those of 2017 (which seem to have been slightly revised since they were published last year), with some comments to follow:

Species

Number used in 2018

Number used in 2017

Mice

2,568,197

2,781,685

Fish

454,340

514,059

Rats

177,904

241,544

Domestic fowl

141,069

125,280

Sheep

53,672

47,499

Guinea Pigs

6,445

22,560

Horses

10,424

10,600

Rabbits

11,159

10,362

Dogs

4,481

3,847

Non-human primates

3,127

2,962

Other species

89,099

28,975

Total:

3,519,917

3,789,373

Direction of travel: You may notice that there has been a fall of about 7% in the numbers since last year. You certainly will notice it if you read the Home Office report itself, since the point is made twice in the first four pages, as is also the fact that this is the lowest number since 2007 (a fact highlighted in attractive purple each time). There has been a fall in each of the last three years, so perhaps it is now possible to detect a real and very welcome downwards trend after years of more or less steady increase. Still, there is a long way to go (to go back), for even this 2018 number is about 34% greater than the number recorded in 2001.

Particular species: There has been a fall in numbers for most species, but you’ll see that two of those which have special protection under the 1986 Act have not enjoyed a share in it: dogs and non-human primates. The sad thing is that these animals are mainly used in so-called ‘regulatory testing’, the most patently unpleasant category of research, and one which has always had the worst severity ratings: this year, 12.5% of the procedures were classified as ‘severe’ (i.e. the top pain rating), compared to about 2% of the procedures for ‘basic’ research. Dogs (which mercifully don’t appear in the ‘severe’ category this year) and primates are used primarily for the testing of human and veterinary ‘medical products’, by the method called ‘repeated dose toxicity’. Other animals in this category of research may be required to test industrial chemicals, biocides, animal feeds (this, we’re told, is “for the safety of target animals, workers and environment”, so God knows what these feeds contain), and an unspecified ‘other’, in which again both dogs and primates feature.

The testing methods used on the less-protected animals still include the notorious LD50 and LC50 tests, as well as unspecified ‘other lethal methods’. That word ‘other’ acquires a sinister character in these records, but “other lethal” is an illogical category anyway, since all or nearly all this laboriously counted work is lethal in the not-so-long run for the animals, even when they are not killed by the product itself.

The 10,000 or so procedures on horses recorded in this Home Office report (up 19% since 2009) appear likewise mainly in this ‘regulatory’ category, although in fact the horses are being used not for testing but for the routine production of blood derivatives. You can see some of the uses to which this blood is put being advertised on the web-site of TCS Biosciences (“your partner: For Life”). In the USA, these uses include the keeping of farmed sows regularly in heat, by means of ‘Pregnant Mare Serum Gonadotropin’. I mention this as one stray and disgusting instance of the way that animal research serves and therefore promotes high-tech animal farming. Scientists often compare the animal costs of their work favourably with the suffering and death-rate in agriculture; it’s a defence they have been using ever since they discovered that vivisection required defending. But the distinction is altogether disingenuous: farming as now practised would not have been possible, let alone profitable, without the steady support of laboratory science.

Democracy at work, or not: The 1986 Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act requires the Home Office to “publish and lay before Parliament” these annual statistics in order that the people, acting through their representatives, can knowingly assent to them. In practice this assent is assumed rather than annually petitioned for. Some challenges there are, of course. ‘Early Day Motions’ may be tabled, in which MPs express their dissent: at present there is one such (EDM 66), signed by 63 MPs and calling for “a thorough, properly moderated public scientific debate on the misleading and costly practice of trying to apply results from animal experiments to human patients.” Or questions may be put to ministers; for instance, on 3 September 2018, the excellent (and vegan) MP Kerry McCarthy asked about the increased use of horses for blood collection, as mentioned above. Much more rarely there are dedicated debates, the most recent of them on 5 February 2013, held in Westminster Hall and simply titled ‘Animal Experiments’.

But the lack of a proper departmental home and a dedicated minister for all animal subjects means that no great momentum is ever created out of these haphazard initiatives. Animal research alone is dealt with in fragments by at least three major departments: the Home Office, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and the Department of Health and Social Care. It’s a situation tragi-comically reflected in the name of the Home Office agency responsible for putting out these annual statistics: the Fire, Licensing and Public Order Analysis Unit.

In the absence of sustained parliamentary fuss, these statistics and the exploitation of animals which they dimly shadow have come to seem like a sort of natural or at least sociological phenomenon, rather than a deliberate moral choice. The Home Office report itself sets the style for that way of viewing them. Surveying the variations in numbers over the years since 1987, it provides this helpful explanation: “The number of procedures carried out on living animals is determined by several factors, including the focus of scientific and medical endeavours, the economic climate and global trends in new technologies or fields of research.” No one’s really in charge, then; we’re all just bystanders. And it then becomes reasonable to take the view noted in this blog when last year’s statistics were published: that is, that big numbers are actually an indication that all’s well in UK life-science research – or, as one promotional organisation has said this time round, “Year-to-year numbers are thus best seen as a reflection of the current health of UK bioscience investment and will fluctuate year-on-year.”

Fluctuate! We’re a very long way here not just from the pains of the animals whom these statistics are nominally about, but also from the moral purpose clearly though imperfectly put into political effect in the 1986 Act and the 2010 European Directive. For them, downward was the desired and proper direction, not an accident of economics.

Well, it’s true that counting animals is not the essence of animal rights, but falling numbers are emphatically better than rising numbers, and if the present trend in that direction is to be kept going we need to remind our political representatives (even at this least propitious of political times) to keep the subject controversial. Many MPs really do mind about animals, and even more of them know that their constituents do. To illustrate as much, here is an MP speaking about animal research back in 1971, at the high point of vivisection numbers in the UK, just preceding the long fall towards 2001: “I know that the object is to preserve human life; but it does make me wonder whether a human race that can take such morally degrading practices in its stride is really worth preserving.”

Yes, that’s the proper context in which to view and debate these annual statistics.

Unfortunately I don’t know who the last-mentioned MP was: he or she is quoted without name or reference by Desmond Morris in his book Intimate Behaviour (Jonathan Cape, 1971), p.183.

The photograph of a rhesus macaque monkey in Oxford University’s Biomedical Sciences Building, probably himself long since an annual statistic, is used by courtesy of the university’s Public Affairs Office.